Paleoconservative Observations

Obama’s Imperial War With Libya

The UN, having obtained US Support, has now moved to create a “no fly” zone over Libya. Oh, what can we say.

Obama is now getting on the train he couldn’t get off after saying–unwisely in my opinion–Kaddafi must go. That’s the problem with threats . . . they cascade upon themselves. This appears chiefly an emotional reaction to disturbing and violent news from the region, coupled with a self-fulfilling prophecy of presidential rhetoric. There is no real moral reason to intervene here and not, say, Iran a few months ago or Bahrain or Egypt or many other places. And the reasons here are many times less compelling than Iran, which has, unlike Libya, been hostile to the US in very recent times.

We should all be concerned that Obama is moving without any congressional authorization. Indeed, there’s been almost no debate. It’s weird. Wake up one day, and we’re at war. This is a terrible precedent, not so different from what the first President Bush tried to pull in the First Gulf War, though he ultimately did get a congressional resolution. Obama spoke out against this sort of thing when he was in Congress. But like most presidents, he has fought to preserve and expand the power of the office once he was in it, even as he has used that increased power to undermine America the nation. But even strong presidents have generally recognized in the momentous matter of war, the people’s representatives deserve a say.

Obama is turning against the one thing he had going for him in the last campaign: relative realism and restraint on foreign policy. Contra my putatitively conservative brethren, I do not embrace the US-as-global-cop role. It is expensive, it does us little good, and it allows small regional conflicts to become global ones. Many Americans agreed in 2008, fed up as they were with the indeterminate outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the antagonism these wars fueled in the Muslim world. Now we have a President who eloquently spoke to these themes going down the road to permanent war counseled by the psychotic duo of Senators McCain and Lieberman. And worse, he is doing so at the insistence of Britain and France, nations whom we should respect, but not nations whom we should follow into every hare-brained European-style human rights war.

Worst of all, we have no strategy here. Though legally required, a congressional debate may not do any good, because, in both parties, we see a reactive, emotion-laden, and vaguely Wilsonian approach to the world that has no end game, cannot distinguish the important from the irrelevant, and, through a misplaced concern for “human rights,” makes no distinction between a genuine threat to the global order from what used to be called “internal affairs.” So today we go to war with Libya. Iran, not so much. We are this big, lumbering, powerful country, but our leaders’ thinking is worse than that of children. It’s like that of adolescents: impulsive, overly self-satisfied, contemptuous of risk, ignorant of potential pitfalls, forgetful of recent failures, and a product of peer pressure.

Finally, in Europe and in America we have this confused idea that “no fly zones” are something short of war. It’s true, they’re much safer for our guys than a land war. In Kosovo, we had zero casualties, even as we bombed Serbian bridges and cities. In that sense, air strikes are sometimes the right tool to use. But they are still acts of war, with bombing and killing and violations of another nation’s sovereignty, as well as some risk to the life and limb of Americans. Yes, Kaddafi is a bad man. He killed Americans back in the day and was punished for it (or made recompense in the case of Lockerbie). If this were a merely retaliatory raid, I might be more sympathetic. But American no longer does retaliatory raids. Every campaign is wrapped not in the flag but in the mantle of concern for democracy. This is the Democratic Party’s version of neoconservatism, plain and simple, where the lack of national interest is held up as proof of our purity of motive. But this type of “freedom” is no formula for peace, as it makes a potential enemy of every nation on earth that is not governed like us.

While I am no pacifist, for moral and self-interested reasons, I must prefer peace to war. Peace is not just a state of mind. It involves something tangible and fundamental: not undertaking aggressive military action unless it is a last resort connected to national interest. The concern for the national interest, if widely shared and enshrined in international law, limits the effect of war. It certainly limits the impact of war on our own nation.

A strong principle once existed for condemning war unless it was a defensive act. This was the European system of the last 400 years, particularly after the Congress of Vienna. But it’s been degraded since the end of the Cold War in the name of human rights. It faced an earlier challenged in the name of ethnic homogenization, as in the Franco-Prussian War. But even this principle had natural limits, and it was thoroughly discredited (or rendered irrelevant by ethnic cleansing) after World War II.

Now even this limiting principle is gone. Americans will suddenly go to war for Rwandans and Libyans and Chadians and God knows who else. We can’t go to war for everyone everywhere, and say we’re for peace. If we’re engaging in “humanitarian” wars without even a patina of concern for national interest, then our nation is acting like naked imperialists. Just because a handful of nations, in the name of Europe, team up and say they’re in the right doesn’t make this conglomerate non-imperialist. It’s just cooperative imperialism. It doesn’t change the reality.

I genuinely felt sick during the Kosovo War. I knew what it meant to be “ashamed” of your country. It was a new feeling for me. Not only was our nation getting into an unnecessary war, but it was doing so for stupid reasons, badgered by confused Europeans, swindled by propaganda, and we were on the wrong side. Today it’s the same. While I feel much less sympathy for Kaddafi compared to Christian Serbia, it’s otherwise a nearly identical situation.

Iraq, at its worst, still had some arguable connection to national interest, even if the war ultimately proved unnecessary or based on a mistaken premise. Afghanistan clearly had such a connection, even if it’s dragged on too long, having metamorphisized into a democracy-building campaign. But Kosovo? Somalia? And now Libya? These are the military interventions of an idiotic national leadership, Republican and Democrat.

Obama, after waxing and waning, has made a choice. He neglected to tell the American people why this is so important. And now, showing solemn regard for the seriousness of war, he is off . . . to Brazil!?!

9 Responses

Agreed about the Libya thing. If there’s any case where intervention is clearly not wise, it’s this one. It scares me to think what might happen in future conflicts when arguments for intervention might have at least a tiny bit of merit, unlike the Libya case. If we’re going this far on Libya, I’m afraid the reaction to a future conflict having at least a tiny connection to American interests might be, “Send in the Marines!”

I’m a little skeptical of your history lesson, though. Is the following really true? “A strong principle once existed for condemning war unless it was a defensive act. This was the European system of the last 400 years….” I thought that in that system war was permitted, that jus ad bellum became just a procedural matter: you have to declare war, it has to be between states, etc. The rough analogy that’s often used is that war was treated as a “duel” between sovereigns. Of course rulers gave moral justifications for their wars, but the system of sovereign states gave a “right” to go to war, putting aside medieval concerns of just cause: “Silete theologi in munere alieno.” I guess all this is based mostly on Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, but also on other stuff I’ve read.

If that’s true, then there’s also a problem with your language when you wrote, “But [no fly zones] are still acts of war, with bombing and killing and violations of another nation’s sovereignty….” In fact, the only reason such an act of war could be considered a violation of sovereignty in the old modern (Westphalian) system you refer to is that it’s in support of rebels, i.e. fighters in an internal conflict. In the old modern system, if this or another act of war were carried out because we don’t like Gaddafi’s mustache, it would not be a violation of sovereignty. It would be one or more sovereign states starting a war against another sovereign state, a normal event in the system of sovereign states.

All that having been said, you’re a lawyer and I’m not so I defer to your expertise. One point of usage where I think I am right, though: it’s “hare-brained,” not “hair-brained.” And the intervention in Libya truly is hare-brained.

By the way, I’ve been wondering what’s the reason behind this whole decision, fancy rhetoric aside. Here is an article that claims to explain why Obama suddenly went pro-intervention. Interesting if true.

Martin Kramer writes in reaction to that article:

I’ve got a different take. The “Arab Spring” has been a rout for the West’s allies: Ben Ali and Mubarak out, Yemen’s Saleh and Bahrain’s Al Khalifa shaken. Obama urgently needs to see an adversary of the US toppled, yet there’s no prospect of that in Iran or Syria. So Qaddafi’s been put in the kill box. But since the Qaddafi “problem” had been solved by Bush, this won’t balance the ledger: negative for the US.

Aaron, I think you may have a point. There was an evolution from the morally neutral “arbitration to arms” view post-Westphalia to the post-WWI condemnation of aggressive war. That said, I believe it’s long been considered no adequate reason to go to war strictly because of another nation’s internal affairs and suppression of rebellion. Indeed, every nation on earth does that and un-uniformed combatants have long been condemned by all sides since Westphalia.

On your second quote, I think the commenter is trying to find devilishly clever logic and strategy among stupid people who reveal themselves to be weak strategists. I believe this turn of events was merely reactive. I suppose we could more easily fight Qadaffi than a US ally. But in doing so we put our inconsistency in high relief.

We’ve been lied to about this mission. It was sold to us as the creation of a “no-fly” zone. Take away the air advantage. But the continuing attacks on tanks and ground personnel reveal that it is something much different. When was the last time a president told the truth about why we must go to war?

Incidentally, do soldiers we kill and the collateral dead have human rights? Do they have any rights? These dead are mostly pawns, or, worse, bystanders. Who granted America the right to kill them?

“I believe it’s long been considered no adequate reason to go to war strictly because of another nation’s internal affairs and suppression of rebellion.”

That kind of depends. Sovereign states have been fishing in the troubled waters of rebellions in other countries for thousands of years. Of course, Britain intervened in Greece’s rebellion as part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, France intervened in our revolution, and both countries came within a hair’s breadth of intervening in our Civil War. So while our intervention in Libya may or may not be warrented (I personally think that the U.S. will be well rid of Kaddafy, and that bombing his shock troops will save lives, but of course I could be wrong) such interventions were not unknown under the Westphalian state system. Whether they were legal or moral or not, I can’t say, but they did occur.

I am perhaps most confused by the question of how prolonging a civil war that was about to end is the best way to protect civilian lives.

I am also wondering, if the rebels win, do we then have to start bombing them when they start killing Kaddafi supporters?

I did, however, truly enjoy hearing this comment on CNN. “NATO forces are engaged in operations supporting the civilians who are fighting Kaddafi”.

From listening to CNN, it seems we are engaged in a war against the “Kaddafi forces” in support of the “civilian forces”. You get the feeling that the level of analysis going on in most news organisations is about at the level of Kaddafi = Cobra Commander.

“You get the feeling that the level of analysis going on in most news organisations is about at the level of Kaddafi = Cobra Commander.”

Yes, the mass media is getting stupider almost by the minute, with CNN leading the pack. Edward R. Murrow was an overrated hack, but he was the voice of intellect and reasoned analysis compared to these guys. It’s like the news on “Idiocracy” – “Back to you, Velveeta”…